We discuss a concept based on replacing a large-aperture monolithic adaptive optical transceiver telescope with an array of small phase-locked sub-apertures with adaptive correction of phase distortions incorporated directly into each sub-aperture, referred to here as adaptive photonics phase-locked elements (APPLE). In the APPLE system, the conventional high-resolution adaptive optics (AO) system is substituted by an array of low-resolution "local" AO sub-systems (distributed AO) operating in parallel.